Winter outlook: Honestly vague

It may have something to do with the public's fascination with snow or degree-day obsessions, but the annual winter outlooks draw far more attention than those for spring, summer, or fall.

The government's Climate Prediction Center released its outlook on Thursday morning, and, predictably, it's heavy on ambiguity, even though it appears to have more specificity than we've seen in previous forecasts.

You'll find no mention of "snow," nor much of anything that would qualify remotely as click bait, and you'll have to do some math to decipher it.

But of all the outlooks already issued or to come, none would be more honest than this one since it's the most "objective" and stays within the limits of the science.

And those limits argue eloquently that in mid-October it is all but impossible to know with any precision what will happen in December, January, and February .

Any specificity has to do with the vast areas of the tropical Pacific where sea-surface conditions right now are unusually warm, brewing what is likely to be one of the strongest El Niño events on record.

The climate center is confident El Niño will perturb the atmosphere through the winter, and since weather moves west to east, and the tropics are the atmosphere's "engine room," it will have a huge influence on weather in North America.

It may well end up training fire hoses on the California drought and ruining winter for some Florida snowbirds.

But, no, don't get your hopes up that government researchers have at long last unlocked nature's secrets.

El Niño isn't the only agent driving the world's weather. In the Mid-Atlantic, conditions in the Arctic and the North Atlantic are big players in winter, and they aren't predictable beyond several days.

Even in California and Florida, where El Niño might help wring out above normal precipitation, the outlook is circumspect.

As for the Philadelphia region, let's just say the outlook won't be real helpful for making your winter plans.

The climate center forecast maps show probabilities for precipitation and temperature across the nation in three categories -- normal, above, and below – for Dec. 1 –Feb. 29 period.

Given three categories, all things being equal -- which they never are -- the probability of any one category playing out in any given region would be 33 percent.

For our area, the map suggests that the odds of temperatures and precipitation finishing above normal for the three-month period are a little better than 33 percent.

Another way to look at it: The chances of temperatures and precipitation being below normal are less than 33 percent, since the sum of normal and "above" is slightly greater than two-thirds.

The boldest evidence of El Niño-driven certainty is in a stripñ of the Southeast from the Florida Panhandle to the Carolina coast where the probability of above-normal precipitation is 60 percent.

Adding that to the "normal" category, the chances for below-normal precipitation would be less than 10 percent.

In the coming weeks, we are likely to see some more-interesting and entertaining winter outlooks, but none quite as honest.